In a distributed computing environment, software on a first computing device is often loaded onto a second computing device for execution on the second computing device. A typical scenario is when a client computer downloads software from a server computer over a network for execution on the client computer. This can often come up in the context of a web-based environment, in which a user at the client computer accesses a web page on the server computer, and interaction between the client computer and the server computer causes execution of software programs on the client computer.
A client computer can have a relatively limited amount of resources (e.g., storage resources and/or processing resources). For example, the client computer can be a mobile device such as a personal digital assistant, a mobile telephone, and the like. Alternatively, the network between the client computer and the server computer may be a relatively low bandwidth network. In the above scenarios, downloading relatively large amounts of software code (some of which may not be needed) onto the client computer may be inefficient, since overloading of the client computer may occur, or network bandwidth may be unnecessarily consumed.